Last class we spoke about The Stanley Milgam Experiments, The Stanford Prison Experiments and The Asch Conformity Experiments. We discussed authority and what that does to people in vulnerable or difficult scenarios. This class forced me to question how I’ve been throughout my life during traumatic events and how I’ll act in the future, should these situations arise.
In the Milgram experiment there was a 'teacher' assigned and a 'student' assigned. The 'teacher' cannot see their 'student' but can hear them. For every wrong answer the 'student' gives, the 'teacher' has to shock them. The student is a part of the test, so he is not actually being hurt, but the teacher thinks he is. Over time, as the shocks get stronger and stronger, the student screams, yells, begs for the shocks to stop and then goes quiet. The purpose of the experiment was to focus on the
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When have I allowed bad things to happen, because there were peer groups watching as well? Would I be the one to step up and vocalize the injustice? Would I stay silent, as there were others to be held accountable? Kitty’s death will forever haunt me- I can’t imagine how her neighbors felt, year after year knowing she may be alive if they were to have called 911.
Lastly, we spoke on The Stanford Mock Prison of 1971. Stanford University students were tested for mental strength- and the healthiest of them were chosen to participate. Half became mock prison guards, half became mock prisoners. They gave the guards a badge, crowbar, cuffs, etc. and allowed them to make the false arrests, giving them a sense of power. The prisoners were given numbers, not called by their names, wore prison clothes, etc.
On the first night prisoners rebelled, laughed and disrespected the guards. But, over time, they fell in line to their positions. They were strip-searched, punished with solitary confinement and many of them ended up having to leave due to mental
With each wrong answer came an electric shock that the teacher, a random male participant, had to physically cause. The teacher could hear the learner after a while begging to stop. At this point the teachers causing the pain are obviously uncomfortable. Some start by laughing nervously and other just immediately beg to stop the experiment. At this point the experimenter gives a series of orders to push the teacher to continue. As a result, two-thirds of participants carried on shocking the learner to the highest level of four hundred and fifty volts. All the participants involved continued up to three hundred
Another instance where V 's actions harm innocent people without caring was when he ordered innocent people to wear Guy Fawkes masks and march to the parliament to watch the explosion. These citizens could have been killed by the military officers who waited for orders to strike though no orders were given. If V was a revolutionary, he could have found the way of making a statement without risking the lives of the innocent citizens. His evil actions present him as a rebel against the government and his fellow citizens. He also states that ‘ 'violence could be used for good. ' ' V 's actions of not caring about the others were the same as compared to Stanley Milgram experiment actions. The subjects in this experiment were suffering, but the experimenter did nothing to relieve the students the pain. Instead, he urged the teachers to continue to torture the students knowing very well they were suffering from the high voltage. The teachers played the sadist role as they agreed as they completely obeyed the experimenter 's instructions. V 's evil actions also present him as a sadist by enjoying hurting people and killing the ones who were in charge of the experiments.
Image 2. This picture shows the inside of the fake prison which was located in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Building (Prison Experiment, image 6). The purpose of this experiment was to see how ordinary people would change based on their positions of power and living conditions. The participants were arrested by police officers and sent to the fabricated prison for further processing.
Prisoners were then given smocks and chains on their feet. Each one had to wear a number as their “ID” to make them less individualized. To stimulate a shaved head, the men wore stocking caps on their head that were made from women stockings. The point of the smocks and stocking caps were not only to make them feel more feminine, but also to feel humiliated. The guards were given khaki uniforms, billy clubs, whistles, and sunglasses.
"Obedience", Stanley Milgram stated, "was more of a function of the situation than of the personalities of the participants." (Wade, Pg. 259). A football player from a local university died after the coach made him go through hours of a grueling weight lifting routine. He was given very little water or rest, the player wanted to stop but continued because the coach told him to. His fellow team mates also wanted to help but kept going with the workout because the coach said to.
The Stanley Milgram Experiment This experiment by Stanley Milgram was about obedience. He wanted to express the conflict between obedience and authority. He put an ad in the newspaper for male participants to take part in a study for learning at Yale. The experiment was that the participant was paired with another person and they drew straws to find out who would be the “teacher” and who would be the “learner”, but it was fixed so that the participant was always the teacher, and the learner was someone that Milgram worked with, who was only pretending to be a real participant.
Stanley Milgram’s shock experiment was of much controversy when it was carried out in the early 1960’s and many questioned its ethical design. Milgram wanted to study the relationship between obedience to authority and moral conscience. To do this, he randomly assigned his participants into two groups, one group being the “learners” and the other, the “teachers”. The teachers and learns were to wait together until they were called in for the experiment. Once called, the teacher would remain in a room with an electric shock generator (to administer shocks the learner) and the “experimenter”, who actually was an actor is a lab coat.
At this point, the Teacher and Learner were separated into different rooms where they could communicate but not see each other. The Teacher was then given an electric shock from the electro-shock generator as a sample what the Learner would supposedly to receive during the experiment. After the Teacher was given a list of word pairs which he was to teach the Learner. The Teacher began by reading the list of word pairs to the learner. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and read four possible answers. To respond the Learner would press a button to indicate their answer, if the answer was wrong the teacher would shock the Learner with the voltage increasing by 15-volts for each wrong answer, if correct the Teacher would read the next word pair. The subjects believed that for each wrong answer the Learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After a series of wrong answers the Learner would start complaining about their heart, afterwards there would be no response from the Learner at all. Many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner at this point in the experiment. Some paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment, while most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects even began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress when they heard the screams of the
Stanley Milgram conducted one of the most controversial psychological experiments of all time: the Milgram Experiment. Milgram was born in a New York hospital to parents that immigrated from Germany. The Holocaust sparked his interest for most of his young life because as he stated, he should have been born into a “German-speaking Jewish community” and “died in a gas chamber.” Milgram soon realized that the only way the “inhumane policies” of the Holocaust could occur, was if a large amount of people “obeyed orders” (Romm, 2015). This influenced the hypothesis of the experiment. How much pain would someone be willing to inflict on another just because an authority figure urged them to do so? The experiment involved a teacher who would ask questions to a concealed learner and a shock system. If the learner answered incorrectly, he would receive a shock. Milgram conducted the experiment many times over the course of 2 years, but the most well-known trial included 65% of participants who were willing to continue until they reached the fatal shock of 450 volts (Romm, 2015). The results of his experiment were so shocking that many people called Milgram’s experiment “unethical.”
As soon as the prisoners challenged the authority of the guards, the guards instinctively shut the prisoners down and reestablished their authority. One instance where a prisoner rallied against the guards was when prisoner 819 started to barricade himself in his cell. In effect to his disobedience, the guards made the other prisoners do mindless work. Another case of disobedience was when prisoner 416 went on a hunger strike. This made the guards upset and they felt that 416’s hunger strike was a threat to their authority.
In “The Milgram Experiment,” the author recounts the procedure of one of the most recognised psychological studies of obedience where 40 males were recruited under the impression of investigating “learning” as learners and teachers. The teachers were instructed by an “experimenter” to administer an electric shock to the learner each time they made a mistake. The purpose of this experiment was to research and determine the limits of people in hurting others when given instruction from an authority figure to do so. The author suggests that the Psychologist that conducted this experiment, Stanley Milgram, was inspired by the events that transcended in Germany during World War II.
In 1963, Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist, conducted a series of experiments known as the Milgram Experiments. These experiments were used to determine if people are governed by their own free will or a mindless obedience to what they consider to be authority. Milgram believed that the acts that occurred during WWII, mainly the near-genocide committed by the Germans, wasn’t free-will, but a mere following of orders. When this experiments were conducted, you required two subjects, one was going to be the “teacher” and the other the “learner.” Straws were drawn for determination of the role, However, this was fixed as the confederate would always be the learner.
There are several factors that can contribute to a person blindly following any type of authority, one of which is routinization. The Asch study was originally intended to be a test on how willing the subjects were to comply with peer pressure, but it also shows how easily routinization will affect a subject’s mind. Milgram’s experiment was to find out how willing a subject was to obey an authority, but it, too, shows that routinization of the authority’s commands affects the way a subject will act. According to both the Milgram experiment and Ash’s study, routinization is the major factor that caused subjects to obey authorities to an extent that they, most likely, never would have before.
The purpose of Milgram’s experiment was to see how far people would go to obey authority. His scientific methods followed the scientific procedure and produced external validity. There were 20 variations of Stanley Milgram’s experiment some factors remained consistent throughout all variations, while some remained the same, while some changed. The four experimental conditions grew in intensity. In the first condition, also known as remote feedback, the learner was isolated from the subject and could not be seen or heard except at three hundred volts when he pounded on the wall. At three hundred and fifteen volts he was no longer heard from until the end of the experiment. The naive subject was required to keep administering shocks with an unresponsive human at the other end. Put yourself in the teacher’s shoes. In the second condition (voice feedback) the learner was placed in an adjacent room, when he started to shout and protest at lower shock levels he could be heard through the crack in the door. In the third
Some suggested after this experiment many people could feel hurt, embarrassed, and not willing to trust those in authority in the future (Hock, 2012). Dr. Burger wanted to replicate Milgram’s experiment in a more ethical approach. He only allowed the teacher to go up to 150 volts of shock because that was the point where he decided, if passed, they would continue to go up the shock scale. The participators were told explicitly and repeatedly that they could leave the study at any time and still keep their $50 (Burger, 2009). However, Dr. Burger observed some people continued to go up the